


The New Arrangement

by viaorel



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Explicit Language, M/M, Mention of Forced Cannibalism, Pre-Slash, vegan!Hannibal (but still jacked up in the head)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 07:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1295794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viaorel/pseuds/viaorel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will and Mischa are best buddies at the FBI Academy and are quite satisfied with being weird together, but one day Will gets a gift lunch from Mischa's older brother, whom he considers to be a strange guy with even stranger tastes. Will is intrigued, Mischa hates the idea of them meeting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Arrangement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BraveKate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BraveKate/gifts).



> This work is a gift to BraveKate, whom the idea belongs to.

His lungs are on fire when he finally catches up with her, in the home stretch, when their personal beacon signaling the end of the distance is already looming ahead on the park road. Other students, who are sitting on the grass enjoying their free time before classes, follow them with curious gazes and raised eyebrows, but Will doesn’t care – his mind is set upon one thing only: beating her this time.

But in the last, decisive moments she gets a second wind and rushes forward like a ferocious tigress reluctant to let go of her prey. She reaches the tree with a broken branch – their beacon – first, Will right behind her, panting and trying his best not to let his heart jump out of his throat.

“Couldn’t you let me win at least this once?” Will puffs out minutes later, when they are sitting in the shadow of their tree, sipping tepid water carefully and still grinning from the adrenaline rush. “Does the phrase “birthday boy” hold no sacred significance to you?”

She ruffles his damp hair affectionately and perhaps a tad apologetically but remains silent. Will understands. He wouldn’t want to have another’s back hampering the picture he creates before his eyes whenever he runs. His mind, in such moments – the mind of a wounded fourteen-year-old, not a grownup pushing thirty – would start asking all sorts of questions then: who is this person, what does she have to do with the monsters, are they on the same team or is she with the monsters? Mischa is probably afraid of the same kind of interference, but Will has no way of knowing: in all the months they have been running together, he has never been able to outrun her. This might have been a matter to be concerned about if not for the fact that Mischa is the fastest student of this batch at the academy.

They take a shower and go listlessly through their report writing seminar and then – an Ethics lecture, which would be much more fun if the professor were not shooting questions at them all the time solely to listen to Will’s awkward stuttering and Mischa’s half-assed responses. Perhaps the professor thinks it strange that the two of them sit separately from the group of their peers all the time. Perhaps she made it her mission to destroy their little private club of peace-lovers. Will has just turned twenty seven and Mischa will catch up with him in a couple of months, but it still feels a lot like school.

“Finally,” Mischa sighs as she slides onto the bench at a vacant table of the dining hall. Other FBI academy students are all there too and even more keep oozing in, but no one sits with them even when it gets too crowded. Which is, frankly, a relief for the both of them – they have long established that they don’t need other company.

“Here,” she produces a brown paper bag from her backpack and places it in front of Will. “This is for you.”

“For me?” He eyes the bag questionably. “Is it a present? Mischa. . .”

“Will, I remember the no-present agreement, don’t be stupid. It’s just lunch.”

A present would have actually made sense – more than Mischa cooking for him, for one.

“Did you? . .”

“No, dumbass,” she snorts and extracts an identical paper bag with her elegant steel lunch box. “My brother found out about your birthday and decided it was his duty to cook you a gift lunch. I tried to talk him out of it, but he’s weird when it comes to food, so I’m sorry.”

“Hannibal made this for me?”

Will is not quite sure he knows how to react to that. On the one hand, no one has ever given him edible presents before, on the other – if you put together all the trivia Mischa has ever shared with him about her older brother, he seems like an odd individual.

Will doesn’t know a lot about Mischa’s brother. He knows Hannibal is big on medicine and criminal psychiatry and that the past couple of years he has been working his ass off to get a degree, he is an opera geek, hates casual wear and messes. It is not a lot, but still better than what he knew about Hannibal two months ago, which is right about nothing. However, when Hannibal returned from Johns Hopkins, an M.D., to live and support his sister’s ambitions in Quantico, Virginia, his name started surfacing from time to time in their lives as FBI academy students.

The first time it happened when Mischa Lecter came to class without all the lavish and, to be completely honest, tacky jewelry she likes wearing so much. Her worn-down t-shirts and shorts that concealed her lean beautiful body had also disappeared, and instead there were very elegant navy blue pants, a vest of the same color fitting her small chest tightly and a jacket. The usual artsy bedlam on her head had given way to an intricate hairdo, showing off her amazing cheekbones and her frail but fiercely stunning features.

“What happened?” Will asked after he found his voice in his throat.

Mischa shrugged, “My stupid brother said he felt ashamed of the way I looked. We made a deal: I let him do all this to me and he gets to change whatever he damn wishes in my kitchen.”

Will was too distracted by the notion that her legs looked almost identical in those pants, which was highly unusual – after years of attempts, Mischa had given up and stopped trying to conceal her disability. The pants somehow managed to do the trick.

“Wh- You have a brother?”

“Yeah, Hannibal. He’s lame.” Mischa let out an annoyed puff and dropped her purse (it wasn’t her regular enormous backpack, either, but a lovely small, _feminine_ purse) onto the desk Will was sitting at. “He’s been lost in science for the last couple of years and now practically jumps out of his pants to recommence his brotherly love. Gah, he’s so annoying!”

“And he actually wants to terminate the eternal mess in your kitchen?” Will smirked, to which Mischa rolled her beautifully lined eyes.

“He has this thing about neatness. Don’t ask.”

Another time Will remembers distinctly happened about a week later, when Jack Crawford – _the_ Jack Crawford, Agent-in-Charge of the Behavioral Science Unit – came up to Mischa during training in the park and asked her to give his best to her brother.

“So he’s a doctor now, huh,” Agent Crawford grinned widely, a rare fondness written all over his broad face. “Fancy.”

“Yes, sir,” Mischa replied in a slightly tense voice, and Will, who was cowering behind, too anxious to be so close to the agent, remembered how he thought she must have heard the same thing so many times since her brother’s arrival. People know Hannibal on the force – a notion that more than once made Will’s mind wonder. Hannibal probably shared Mischa’s exquisite cheekbones and those sharp eyes and that sexy accent – _God_ , it sure would be nice to meet him someday. To chat about the cases he consulted on and stuff.

“Well, tell him to call me, all right, Lecter? Tell him I had a dream about those refined cutlets not so long ago. Must be a sign,” Jack Crawford gave her a juvenile wink and then rushed off somewhere, urgent FBI business waiting.

“Ugh, they were stupid vegan cutlets, gosh,” Mischa rolled her eyes after the man. “Why are they all so in love with him?”

Will finally felt safe enough to crawl out of the protection of his friend’s back.

 “What was that cutlet thing he was talking about? Sounded like some kind of secret FBI code.”

“I wish,” she snorted, still exasperated but even more so amused now. “Hannibal cooks for everyone he even remotely likes or needs. And he doesn’t always take the trouble to tell his guests that he serves only vegan stuff.”

“Really?”

 _I could go vegan_ , Will thought at that moment, for no reason at all.

“Really. And it’s stupid and dishonest of him. And why are we still talking about my lame brother? Let’s stop.”

Then there were some other bits and pieces, from which Will found out that, though being potentially attractive and definitely intelligent, Hannibal Lecter is probably not Will’s cup of tea. According to Mischa – and who else knows the guy better than his own sister? – Hannibal is a boring, snobbish, dress-over-the-head control freak. Which overweighs the cheekbones and the accent by a ton.

And now the same Hannibal presented him with the most beautifully laid out lunch Will has ever seen.

“Wow,” is all he manages to say, accompanied by the sound of Mischa’s jaws destroying her cabbage rolls. “I can’t eat that, it’s a piece of art.”

“No, Hannibal will ask how you liked it, and he’s such a pain in the ass about this. He knows when I lie, too, so you have no choice, Will, eat up.”

He does. He starts with the cucumber mini-wraps with chick-pea spread, dill and small pieces of peeled tomatoes inside, then munches off the rich-colored salad with a peculiar dressing he can’t quite put his finger on, hastily shoves the maple-glazed string beans in his mouth as if they might run off, appalled by his lack of manners, and when he finally gets to the multi-layered raw chocolate cake, the mix of unfamiliar, tantalizing flavors on his tongue finally shakes him awake from the devouring trance.

“Oh my God. Is this for real? I think I’m close to having a foodgasm.”

Mischa makes a disgusted face at him. “Just don’t tell me you’re turning vegan now, or else I’ll smash your face in.”

“No, no. But tell your brother thanks for me, it was a wonderful meal. Hey, did you tell him about my birthday?”

Mischa clicks her tongue and sighs, exasperated, “He’s been taking an _active interest_ in my life lately, and you have no idea how he gets when he is zeroed in on something – he just lets out his psychoanalyzing tentacles and fucks your brain raw with them.” Will freezes, horrified by the image, but Mischa doesn’t notice. “He has actually been bugging me about meeting you for weeks, as in you’re my best friend at the academy, I sometimes crash at your place and this is inappropriate, yada yada yada. Now he has made you lunch, which means that soon he will infiltrate your life just like he did mine.”

There is not enough time for Will to process everything, because Jack Crawford comes up to their table and sits near Will with such nonchalance like he does that every damn day.

“Hey, Mischa. Mr. Graham.”

“Jack,” she nods, and did she actually just call him by his name? Will cowers and keeps quiet as he always does when human interaction he doesn’t understand happens around him. “How is the missis?”

“Still raving about those cakes with cashew cream,” the agent smiles fondly as if he were talking not to a student but to a friend. Will is mortified. “Say, I was wondering if your brother would be interested in consulting on a case we are trying to crack now. It’s his area of expertise. Do you think he has enough time? With his practice and all, I realize he’s very busy, but remembering the old days would sure be fun, not to mention beneficial.”

Mischa’s coals of eyes flicker with excitement, “No, he’s not busy at all, Jack! I’ll text him to contact you as soon as humanly possible.”

The agent smiles, “Thank you, Mischa.” And then he turns to Will sitting to his left and asks, “Mr. Graham, I actually wanted to invite you on this one as well.”

Words block his throat as he sputters out, “Me? Why me?”

Agent Crawford’s eyes turn tense for a split second as he says, his voice down an octave, “Your peculiar incident three months ago was not left unnoticed. Things got ugly, true, but in the end the killer got caught – all thanks to your insight. We at the BSU think it can prove useful.”

Only now does Will notice, with every cell in his body, that their table is being scrutinized. Students – people who used to bully him, people who accentuate their boycott of the local crazy, unfamiliar faces who also remember – all stare at Jack Crawford talking to him, perhaps they have even heard his words just now, Will cannot tell how long the heavy silence has been hanging around the hall.

All these people.

“Do you want me to chew someone else’s ear off again? ” Will struggles. “Because I don’t quite feel like turning even more peers against me, thank you very much.”

“It was only a small piece of lobe, don’t be such a drama queen, Will,” Agent Crawford waves his scowl off. “And if you are worried about that psych eval, don’t.”

A familiar flame of repressed anger licks its way out of Will’s solar plexus and up his esophagus.

“What do you mean by that? If you’ve already decided to fail me-”

“I said don’t worry,” Jack Crawford cuts him abruptly, mouth stern and irritated. “The FBI needs you, in whatever capacity.” He stands up and straightens up his jacket. “We will keep in touch. Have your brother call me, Mischa.”

“No problem, Jack,” she nods.

They are silent till the moment Jack gets his coffee and disappears behind the door. Will leans over the table and hisses, “ _Jack_? Since when is he just _Jack_ to you?”

“Since last weekend when he and his wife had dinner with my brother. I was there too. We bonded.”

“You- Mischa, this is our future boss!” Will chokes. He realizes he starts with the weird facial expressions again, the ones that make him look like an epileptic about to have a seizure, but he couldn’t care less at the moment. “You can’t just be all chummy with him!”

Mischa shrugs noncommittally, “Jelly much?”

“What? No, who’s jealous?”

“You tell me.”

There is no point in arguing anymore, so Will stops first.

They end up having a nice day after classes. They go to the gym together and get spent just like on any regular day, then go to Will’s one-room apartment and pick Winston up for a walk. Upon finishing with other trivial chores they buy a six-pack, pick up their order at a Taiwanese restaurant in the neighborhood and head home to spend the evening curled up in Will’s bed. It’s old movies night, so they watch _Casablanca_ and then top it off with _Psycho_ , but by the scene Norman starts swinging his knife at the poor girl in the shower they are already drifting off, Mischa’s cheek pressed to Will’s shoulder, the top of her head touching his jaw. It is peaceful.

And when the nightmares come, it is a great relief to find her comforting body next to his, also panting heavily from the haunting images which never go too far away and draw nigh at the signal of her drifting mind. Will never tells her about his monsters and Mischa never tells him about hers, and this arrangement is not about sharing their fears anyway.

“I’m okay,” she whispers as she catches her breath and sits up to stroke Winston curled up close to them. She touches her stump, strokes the callous skin where her leg ends abruptly, and Will, through the lazy haze of the relief upon waking up in his own bed, wonders if she will ever tell him. It can’t have been a mere accident. A child playing carelessly on the railway track. Perhaps a fallen tree crushing the bone of her calf – couldn’t be saved, the doctor just had to amputate it. No, not it. She wouldn’t be running from her monsters like that, as if she wanted to turn back time and change the very course of action, whisper words of caution into that little girl’s ear, yank at the hem of her sundress and out of danger.

In Will’s head, it always happens in the summer, and he sees trees and grass smeared with red, and someone else, perhaps, someone who had betrayed and who had soiled the little girl’s soul so badly that now she is running not only from the monsters but from that feeling as well. Her hatred. Her deep sorrow because of that.

 

It is hardly six when Will gets that phone call. It is supposed to be a weekend, and no one calls him when it is not study- or job-related. The number is unknown, and so is the voice, but for the slight European accent, music to Will’s ears.

“Hello. Is this Will Graham?”

Will harrumphs loudly into his fist, lingering to figure out if this is a dream. It must be, or else why would he be getting a call from the male version of Mischa?

“This is him.”

“How fortunate. I am sorry for bothering you so early in the morning, Mister Graham, but my sister, your friend, failed to come home last night and her phone does not seem to be working. Is there any chance she is staying with you, as she is in the habit of doing? To my knowledge, at least.”

Will sits sharply in his bed, startling Winston, and checks the room. Mischa is not here, but there is a soothing sound of running water from the bathroom.

“She is with me,” Will says carefully into his phone, not entirely sure what the origin of this awkward stirring inside his chest is. “Her phone must have turned off by itself, the battery is pretty old-”

“No need to explain, Mister Graham,” the smooth voice on the other end interrupts mildly. “She is a grown woman, I simply wanted to make sure she was fine. And I do apologize for calling you like this, she gave me your number a while back.”

“Oh.” Will pulls his knees to his chest and hugs them with his free arm. “That’s fine, Doctor Lecter.”

“Please, call me Hannibal.”

The voice is similar to Mischa’s, with the accent and the low tone, but somehow better. It does things to Will’s spine.

“Call me Will then,” he manages weakly and curses himself for this squeak of an answer. Then again, what does he care how he sounds on the phone with his best friend’s boring stuck-up brother? “Um, by the way, thanks for the lunch. It was amazing, especially the cake. I didn’t know there was raw chocolate.”

“Really?” It is distracting and slightly disturbing to imagine Mischa’s features attached to this voice, and Will shakes his head violently for the picture to be gone. “I am glad you liked it. I hope Mischa gave you my warmest wishes on your birthday yesterday.”

“Er, yeah, she did. Thank you.”

A long pause follows, during which Will can hear the water being turned off and the sound of metal clicking on the tile floor of his bathroom – Mischa is getting out.

“It might be not my place to ask,” the ambient voice flows again, slightly hesitant this time, “but if you are serious about Mischa, I insist on having you for dinner, Will. I may not be her father, but as her older brother I feel certain responsibility to get to know the person she is with.”

People always jump to the same conclusion about them, Will should hardly be surprised, but for some reason the misconception makes him cringe. “No, Hannibal, no! We are not- She is my- I’m gay, we’re just friends. Nothing is going on.”

“Oh?” Hannibal muses in his ear, surprised. “This is a relief, to be honest, I was afraid Mischa was ashamed to show me her partner because he was bad news.”

“No, we. . .” Will cannot stop himself from explaining. “We just run together, study, you know. Hang out. It’s harmless.”

“I am sure you are good for her, Will.” Something about the way Hannibal says his name, a brief pause before and after. Will can’t put his finger on it, but it is very strange. “And in any case, the invitation stands. I am having Jack for dinner tonight, may I hope for your company as well?”

His cheeks suddenly go hot and throbbing, for no apparent reason at all. There is a lump he has to push down his throat before he can say, “What’s the occasion?”

“To discuss the case, of course.” Hannibal seems surprised. “Jack told me this would be your practice as a student. He is very impressed with your academic success and holds great plans for you.”

“He does?”

Mischa steps out of the bathroom, wearing his old wifebeater, legs bare. Will doesn’t direct his gaze on her breasts and instead focuses on the robotic prosthesis that starts from her right knee. It is a very advanced thing that allows her to run like crazy and jump all she wants. It also reminds Will every time of how fragile Mischa really is, how much damage is still there, under the layers and layers of card house strength. This thing will always serve as a reminder – if not to the world, then to Will alone.

She gives him a brow arch as she dries her long dark hair with his towel, and Will feels a pang of guilt in his gut for talking to her brother right now, at this very moment.

“Oh yes,” Hannibal purrs in his ear like a sated beast, and Will shudders from his own fantasy. “He has been interested in you since that episode three months ago, I reckon.”

“You know, huh.”

Mischa mouths a question at him wanting to know who it is, but he simply shakes his head.

“Yes, he told me. So, Will, I hope to see you tonight.”

“Got it.” It takes effort to swallow. “What should I bring?”

“Just my rascal of a sister. Good bye, Will.”

She drops on his bed with a suspicious frown on her flawless face. “Who was that?”

For a split second, Will feels strangely protective of those two minutes on the phone, of that brief pause before and after his name. Mischa’s frown deepens, and he gives in, of course.

“It was your brother. He was worried.”

“What?” she spits out, eyes turning dark as night. “Hannibal called you? What did he say?”

“Mischa, you turned off your phone last night, he wanted to know if you were okay.”

She stings him with a despising glare and reaches for his phone, “Don’t be an idiot, Will, I always do that when I stay the night at your place, Hannibal knows that.” She is already calling the unknown number back as she gets up and walks away. “Hannibal?” she says, already in the hallway. She shuts the door behind her, but Will can still hear one more phrase, “I warned you to stay the hell away, didn’t’ I?”

She runs so fiercely this morning that Will is lagging a good fifteen feet behind, struggling for each next breath, when she reaches the end point, all sweaty and still vibrating with anger. They go through breakfast without bringing up the subject, but in the end Mischa is the one who shatters the silence.

“So,” she begins innocently, pouring coffee into Will’s cup, “dinner tonight, my place.”

Will clears his throat loudly and hopes for it to pass as an answer. He feels pierced by her sharp gaze, her irritation seeping into his chest.

“Hannibal will be kissing your ass the whole night like he always does with new people,” she continues. “Don’t feel special, he’s a narcissistic dick. And don’t get any ideas about that call, he just wanted to hear you praising the lunch. It always gives him boners.”

 

The predominating feeling settled in Will’s chest throughout the whole thing is deep, burning to the core shame. He is not dressed well enough to even stand near this man, he is not well-versed enough, presentable enough and his taste in art and everything else is shit. Mischa’s brother is terrifying in all the good ways.

Jack Crawford is also terrifying but differently so. He presses on Will with his carefully phrased remarks, making him acknowledge things he would never do, but Jack doesn’t seem to notice Will’s uncomfortable shifting or his flitting gaze looking for a hole to burrow himself in and die urgently.

The food is magnificent though, so is the chef, and no matter how much Mischa is going to step on his foot under the table to prevent him from staring, it will not work.

“So, Will,” Hannibal says after sipping elegantly from his wine glass, “they say you are good at understanding criminal minds.”

Jack does not seem to notice Will’s sklent, too busy chasing a pea all around the plate with his fork.

“I guess so,” he acquiesces half-heartedly. “Although so far it’s too early to tell, me being a student and all.”

“No need to be shy,” Hannibal quirks a corner of his lip and gives his sister a pointed stare. “Mischa tells me you are shaping up to be one of those FBI geniuses whom everyone wishes to be.”

“I didn’t say that,” she cringes and bares her teeth at Will, “Don’t get any ideas, dimwit.”

“I merely inferred, Mischa, be nice,” Hannibal scolds, but his voice, though certainly capable of sounding threatening, is actually fond, and so are his dark eyes when he makes the remark. Then they move sharply to focus back on Will, and his heart skips a beat. “I look forward to working with you on that case, Will.”

There it is again. Those weird pauses crowning his name, as if honoring it in some way that Will cannot possibly understand. Hannibal looks pleased with Will’s puzzled face, and even though he has been serving them nothing but vegan dishes all evening, he still resembles a predator lying in wait, with his intense gaze and his perfectly still body. Not a single spare movement. What is he hunting for?

“If you don’t mind,” Jack starts, chewing on a stuffed date, “we could get a head-start after dinner, since all three of us are here anyway.”

“I haven’t officially said yes, Agent Crawford,” Will protests, looking both meekly and defiantly at the agent, whose face slips into an unreadable mask.

“Well,” he takes his time, owning it, “are you going to refuse?”

Will shoots a glance at the man sitting across the table, notices the way his features tense a little. Mischa’s intense stare has almost finished drilling a hole in Will’s face when he answers, “I would like to have that option.”

“As is your right,” Jack nods and spends the next thirty minutes ignoring Will altogether.

Hannibal, on the other hand. . .

He has asked Will five times if he enjoyed this or that dish, three times - if he did not mind the soothing classical music reaching through the slit of an open door, twice – if the chair was comfortable enough and more than Will cared to count – if he would like a refill. Hannibal’s constant awareness of Will, his tireless desire to please is not annoying but rather disconcerting, especially considering Mischa’s disgusted face at her brother’s every phrase containing Will’s name in it. She gets her share of attention as well, but with her it is different.

“Mischa, either finish your dish or put it aside, that is not how one behaves at the table,” Hannibal bosses when he notices her idly stabbing the pomegranate sorbet with a dessert spoon and basically destroying the whole thing.

“Oh,” she flutters her eyelashes innocently, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d notice, being too busy sucking up to Will and all.”

For five whole seconds, the mortification is too great for Will to even raise his gaze, but then a small elegant chuckle escapes Hannibal’s lips and he says, amused, “You have never been good at sharing things.”

Mischa scowls, which is when Jack, who has returned from the bathroom just in time to overhear the last phrase, butts in with a silly comment – and everything is peaceful again. Until five minutes later Hannibal passes another remark about Mischa’s stoop, to which she venomously retorts that not everyone can sit straight up like a freaking robot and Will is also stooping, why isn’t Hannibal scolding him?

“Because I am not responsible for Will,” Hannibal replies, face blank and strangely macabre. “I do, however, feel that my little sister cannot function as a decent human being without my constant supervision, but this is hardly something our guests would appreciate lending an ear to, don’t you agree?”

“I agree with only one thing, Hannibal: that you had better back the fuck off,” Mischa spits out, defiant.

“I am merely being a nuisance because I am concerned for you, Mischa. And please, watch your language, it is simply bad form.”

There is something going on between them, a silent battle of stares and unspoken words that neither Jack nor Will can understand, and for a brief moment Will catches his breath when he sees Mischa’s face wearing the exactly same expression she does running from her monsters every morning. Hannibal does not seem surprised at the mix of pain, betrayal and dry, livid determination directed at him, but something in his solid gaze shifts ever so slightly.

“Will,” Mischa uses his name like a knife to cut through the thick silence hanging around them like a deadly cloud. “Have I ever told you how I lost my leg?”

Hannibal’s face goes white as death at that, his nails dig into the table cloth and pull, turning over his wine glass, but he hardly notices the rapidly spreading lake of burgundy. Will cannot avert his eyes, like a passer-by watching a catastrophe unfold before him.

“Mischa,” Hannibal whispers, hardly able to operate his listless lips. “I am asking you-”

“It was taken from me,” she cuts in sharply and without mercy. “When I was only seven. I used to be a happy child, but after that the whole world became shattered. Because that day I did not only lose my leg.”

“Mischa, please,” Hannibal manages in a choked whisper, but she will not listen. She is in the zone, with the monsters snapping at her heels as she scratches for life and bursts her lungs running.

“I lost my hero,” she finishes, and the pain breaking Hannibal’s irises and flowing free happens simultaneously with a detail clicking audibly back in its place in Will’s huge mechanism of a head as he _sees_.

 The shroud clouding his mind leaves Will be only in Jack’s car, God knows how many minutes later, as the agent wakes up the engine. It’s dark outside, and Jack is throwing a dead gaze straight ahead as he says reluctantly, “You know you’re not supposed to talk about this, right, Will?”

There are red and yellow and white circles appearing before Will’s eyes after he rubs them with his fists like a tired child. It doesn’t make Hannibal’s face disappear though. It’s useless to try and erase it, Will realizes.

“Do you know how it happened?”

Jack snorts joylessly, “They gave me all the details, a big fat fucking folder of reports and psych evals before letting Hannibal even close to a crime scene. He spent two years in an institution as a teen.”

A big part of Will is terrified of the other part, the one which craves to know every single word of those reports, who wants to gawk at the pictures so damn bad.

“The two of them were adopted from Lithuania by a nice American farmer family when Mischa was six and Hannibal was eleven.” They are speeding through the heavily lit streets now, faceless figures on the sidewalks, disinterested and quickly fading from Will’s memory as he keeps looking and finds new things to catch in the dark blur Jack’s car passes. He closes his eyes and sees that family, the Lecters, he presumes, and the two foreign kids who had never known their real parents. “One day, they were out in the woods, picking flowers or fuck knows what else, and they got lost. They were found ten days later in an abandoned shack no one even remembered was still there.”

“What happened?” Will croaks and struggles for a breath as his lungs seem to fail him.

He sees it so clearly now. Jack keeps driving.

“There were three capturers, two of whom were found dead, stuffed with bullets. The kids said the third guy had gone primal on them and then left. They couldn’t remember his face.”

“What did they do?” Will registers his own voice coming out of him in a stifled groan.

“Oh, they thought it was funny how Hannibal’s name rhymed with ‘cannibal’,” Jack replies, voice stripped of emotion. “The rest you can figure out.”

Will can – he has already, his brain throwing him into the places he has never seen, making him experience things he has never done. He knows now how bittersweet it feels to be finally holding that gun, a small but deadly manifestation of the defiance growing incessantly in his chest for all those long days, he knows how hollow it feels at first to realize that some people are not people at all but empty shells, masks behind which there is evil. He remembers how much time it takes to convince himself that not all people are like this, that he is not like this.

“I want to be on that case,” Will says at the end of their drive when Jack drops him off. The agent nods, not surprised at all, and drives off without a word.

 

Mischa is in his kitchen the next morning, hair damp from the shower, his shirt hanging on her slim body, long muscular legs crossed. She makes both of them coffee and keeps silent the whole time they drink. Belatedly, Will realizes they have missed their morning run, but somehow he knows Mischa has brought her monsters with her this time.

“I’m sorry,” she speaks finally, voice tense but not quivering. “I was being a dick.”

Will cannot bring himself to answer – at the moment, words simply fail him. And what are you even supposed to say in such moments? _I’m sorry your brother ate your leg and you still resent him for that?_ He takes a cookie to justify his stupid silence.

“Hannibal’s a great guy and he likes you a lot.” Mischa clicks her tongue as she remembers something. “He has even read your blog – gosh, talk about cheesy - and you have been the hot topic of our discussions for quite a while, so it’s not just out of the blue that he made you lunch or called you.”

  She turns away as she is saying these things so Will has no way of knowing how she feels about all this.

“I just. . . Everyone who meets him gets so infatuated with him,” she sighs and squeezes her naked kneecaps, leaving red marks that fade slowly. “But you were, _are_ my friend, and I guess I just wanted. . .”

“You wanted someone to hate him with,” Will finishes for her now that he finally gets it.

She looks at him then and smiles sheepishly, “It’s not that I actually. . . You know what I mean, right?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Will you promise not to get brain-dead for him?”

“I will hate the shit out of that stuck-up asshole with you, scout’s honor,” Will smirks.

They share a relieved giggle, and then she reaches for him like a drowning person and crushes her face into the crane of his neck. Her breath is shaky but Will knows the tears that might come are not his fault, and not Hannibal’s either.

“He made both of us lunches,” Mischa announces as she buttons up her uniform shirt when they get ready for classes. “And if there is a secret sex note hidden in your salad, I don’t want to know about it. Clear?”

 “Better not mix up the lunch boxes then,” Will shoots back and enjoys her terrified expression to the fullest.

There is no sex note in his salad that day, but there is a text message inviting him over for an early dinner, to which Mischa wrinkles her nose and comments, “I bet watching you chew gives him a raging boner. Perv.”

  Will agrees eagerly with everything she dishes out and fires off a quick _Yes_ when she is not looking. He can get used to this new arrangement.


End file.
